‘Grace and Frankie’ Co-Creator on Season 5 Plans, When the Show Might End, and Why She’ll Never Kill Any of Her Lead Characters

“Grace and Frankie” co-creator Marta Kauffman has been telling stories about life over 70 for four seasons now, but there’s no sign of the show running out of tales to tell, as evidenced by the announcement Wednesday of Netflix renewing the show for a fifth season.

“Every season, it becomes more and more special, because you know you have fewer and fewer left,” she said to IndieWire at SCAD aTVfest in Atlanta. But that doesn’t mean there’s anything resembling a game plan for ending the show. Instead, Kauffman said that if Netflix gave her the option to keep the show going for as long as she wanted, “I’d probably tell them, ‘Let’s do it as long as it’s still comfortable for Jane and Lily.'”

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It’s a fair consideration, given the current ages of stars Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin (80 and 78, respectively). But “they’re doing well,” Kauffman said. “It could be years and years. Who knows?”

Kauffman (who created “Grace and Frankie” alongside Howard J. Morris) said that the writers have been at work already on stories for Season 5, which will pick up on the show-changing events of the Season 4 finale.

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“The way it is with every season, the hope is that you’ve left enough good bird seed that you can find your way. That’s the hope is you’ve dropped all these clues that we can as writers take advantage of in the next season,” she said. “You want stories to continue and not just to stop.”

That said, in writing Season 4, Kauffman said, “We were focused on Season 4 until we got to the last episode — and then said, what do we want to set up for Season 5?”

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The big twists of that final episode, which included Grace and Frankie getting convinced by their children to move into an...